Beyond the Book: Background information when reading The Lincoln Lawyer

Beyond the Book

This article relates to The Lincoln Lawyer

Michael Connelly decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing.  After graduating in 1980, he worked at newspapers in Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. The resulting magazine story was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and landed him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times.  After three years on the crime beat, he began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch. The novel, The Black Echo, based in part on a true crime that had occurred in Los Angeles, was published in 1992, and later won the Edgar Award for best first novel by the Mystery Writers of America. He followed up with three more Bosch books, The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde, and The Last Coyote, before publishing The Poet, a thriller with a newspaper reporter as a protagonist, in 1996. In 1997, he went back to Bosch with Trunk Music, and in 1998 another non-series thriller, Blood Work, was published. Angels Flight was released in 1999 and was another entry in the Harry Bosch series. Void Moon, was released in 2000, and introduced a new character, Cassie Black, a high-stakes Las Vegas thief. His 2001 release, A Darkness More Than Night, united Harry Bosch with Terry McCaleb from Blood Work, and was named one of the Best Books Of 2001 by the Los Angeles Times.
In 2002, Connelly released two novels, City Of Bones (Harry Bosch) and a stand-alone thriller, Chasing The Dime.  Lost Light was published in 2003 and The Narrows, a sequel to The Poet in 2004.  The Closers (another Harry Bosch novel) followed in early 2005, followed by The Lincoln Lawyer late last month.

His books have been translated into 31 languages and have won multiple international awards.

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This article relates to The Lincoln Lawyer. It first ran in the November 9, 2005 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.